10 Things To Do For Every New Site

There are some things that I find myself doing after every new site I make. Here’s a list of the top 10 things to do after you make a new website.

Set up Google Analytics

What better way to analyze your visitors than by installing Google Analytics? This is a must-have on every new site.

Install SQL Buddy

Let’s face it, phpmyadmin looks terrible and must be the last web app on the planet to use frames. SQL Buddy is a beautiful and simplistic application that can do everything phpmyadmin can do, but it doesn’t look like it was made in 1999. Since it’s a PHP based application all you need to do is upload to your server and you’re ready to go!

Submit Your Site to Google

Almost everybody uses Google, so it’s crucial that your site gets indexed. But before your site can get indexed, google has to know about it. You can submit your site to Google here.

Validate Your Site

What better way to show off your web skills than by making sure it’s valid code? The W3C offers an (X)HTML validator and CSS validator.

Get the Word Out

Let other people know your site is made. Advertise on Facebook and Twitter. Digg your site, add it to StumbleUpon. If you’re a member of any forums link to it in your signature if possible. You don’t have to pay a buck to advertise your site.

Do a Security Audit

Make sure your website is secure and not vulnerable to cross site scripting, SQL injection, cross-site request forgery, or any other nasty exploits. You can use the cross-platform application Websecurify to check for these.

GZIP Output

If you’re on Apache, make sure do gzip all outputted files. Not only does it make the page load faster but it saves bandwidth too. I’m not going to try to cover how to do it when many others have, here‘s a straight forward article showing you how to use .htaccess to output gzip’d content.

Compress All Code & Images

I’m not gonna go about the details of doing this because I just wrote an article about compression but it’s an easy step which can save you a lot of bandwidth and your visitors a lot of time.

Check with different browsers

Last but certainly not least make sure to check your site in many different web browsers, visitors are turned away if a site doesn’t look good in their browser. If you want to test earlier versions of Internet Explorer try IETester (for Windows).

Though many of us neglect to do these things some of these can be critical to a website’s success. I hope you enjoyed these tips and make sure to leave a comment!